Month: October 2014

Last month I wrote about SharePoint Branding and made this point: Maintain Functionality This is especially important, and one of the reasons that creating a customized masterpage can be a little intimidating. SharePoint is both and application and a platform and has a lot of baked in functionality and content that will need to be available for the site to function and grow properly. And yes, the site will grow. Remember that you are building out a framework for content. While you may be able to create specific prototypes for specific use cases by hacking up a default masterpage, don’t forget that there are a number of sections that need to be included in order to have the entire SharePoint experience available once the site is live. And this is especially important when working with designers who are more client focused than they are administrator focused. When designers are working on use cases, they almost always focus on the client presentation layer and sometimes forget that there are several types of users for the system (Hence why I love personas and use cases that include ALL users). One fairly common scenario I’ve seen is the following: UI Designer delivers the design comps focusing on the “front door” – i.e. home page. Home page comps don’t have the left navigation. Left navigation is removed because it is not needed Admin goes...